What’s Your R-Score and Why It Matters

When we began our journey at HYCU more than four years ago, we fundamentally believed there was a better way to do multi-cloud data protection.

As we evolved our solutions and support for partners and customers alike, we also realized the importance of recovery in the backup and recovery as a service evolution. The importance of recovery is obvious in light of an outage, corruption or natural disaster. However, it’s become even more important in light of the rise of ransomware.

You can hardly scroll through a news site today without seeing an update on what is going on in the industry around ransomware.

• Ransomware attacks happen on average every 11 seconds.
• More than 4,000 attacks in the US per day since 2016.
• The largest ransomware payout this year that also set the record was for $40 million.

Statistics aside, what has been largely missing from the conversation is how to effectively measure your readiness to recover in the event of a ransomware attack. There are numerous reports, guides and industry sites that can suggest ways to better try and prevent an attack. Or, there is information available that can help with detection once an attack has occurred. And, many in the data protection industry, can share best practice approaches on what to do to assist in the event of a recovery. However, finding a way to quantify what you are doing and measure what you are doing against key categories has been missing.

Fast forward to today, and after months working with some of the brightest minds in the industry including our own IT and technology specialists, we are proud to introduce the first of its kind in the industry, a way to score a company’s ability to recover in the event of a ransomware attack.

We call it R-Score.

We did not just spend time with key industry partners but also with customers. Many of these same customers we have helped to recover from ransomware attacks. While we have been fortunate to avoid the ransom in all of these occasions, the insidious nature of these attacks, and their Darwinian evolution, has only meant it’s not a matter of if an attack will occur but when.

Available at www.getrscore.org, R-Score was designed from the ground up to be a free service to help companies better understand what they should be doing to help recover from a ransomware attack. You can read the details on how it works and one analyst's experience with an end user taking R-Score here. And, I would encourage you to take the R-Score as well to find out what your score is now. As many have noted to us, it’s not just a powerful tool to better understand what goes into being able to effectively and efficiently recover from a ransomware attack, but it provides tips and ways to help you better your overall ransomware recovery score. As part of the launch, and to help comprehensively understand what to do, we are also offering a free 1:1 session. This is move involved and will take longer than just ten minutes, but to those who have sat with us through the sessions prior to launch, it was well worth their time.

HYCU, along with our partners, will be providing regular updates from this free service over time.

A huge thank you goes to all of the partners and investors that helped in making today’s launch possible including Enrique Salem at Bain Capital Ventures, Kevin Mandia at FireEye Mandiant, Craig Abdo at Carahsoft and Tony Safoian at SADA as well as the team at HYCU including Goran Garevski, Subbiah Sundaram and David Byers who helped drive this initiative.

R-Score is a simple but effective way to address what is going on with ransomware at the moment. However, for all of us at HYCU who devote their time to keeping our customers’ data safe and available, we know it’s a meaningful step in the right direction.